


Closure, or Lack Thereof

by orphan_account



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 09:14:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15726426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ichiko Ohya has her suspicions about just what—and who—has been causing the mental shutdowns. And she's the kind of person who never stops until she gets the truth. It's personal, after all.[AU where Akechi lives post-game]





	Closure, or Lack Thereof

 

Ichiko Ohya had learned early in her career that persistence was the way to go if you wanted information. It did make everyone hate you very quickly, but getting what you want was more important than being liked, anyway.

Ichiko knew Akira would never tell her everything about the Phantom Thieves, but she was going to suck as much related information out of him as possible in attempt to put together what she could with her own research. Not even necessarily to publish—she was on their side, after all, and she would never expose them. No, this was about her own curiosity more than anything else. And as was common to people in her line of work, she had enough curiosity to kill a herd of cats.

It became about far more than curiosity when Akira hinted he knew just who was behind the mental shutdowns, however.

Cautiously, but persistently, Ichiko drew little dribs and drabs of information out of him over the course of weeks and months. They spent enough time together that she could do it without it coming off as unnatural. She didn't want him thinking that she was trying to interrogate him, or he might well clam up. She had to be subtle about it.

The final piece of information she squeezed out of him, some time after he got out of juvie, was Goro Akechi's phone number, claiming it was for some entertainment-based piece she was doing on the side. Akechi had practically disappeared after the election last year, and various entertainment outlets were champing at the bit to find out what had happened to the Detective Prince. Akira had been extremely reluctant about it, but Ichiko convinced him that she would make sure the public story about Akechi would paint him in a good light, and it was better to let her handle it than to let some other outlet make up nasty, rumour-based clickbait.

Akira's apparently close involvement and concern for Goro Akechi was interesting and suspicious all on its own. Akira said some vague things about Akechi being a regular customer at Leblanc, some even more vague things implying some kind of conflict between his friends (and anyone who was friends with Akira was suspect as being involved with the Thieves, or a Thief themselves) and Akechi, and when he'd let slip that Akechi was still around—

Well. Ichiko had been neck-deep in research on Masayoshi Shido for months now. The pieces were starting to come together.

And so with a combination of the wheedling and the persistence Ichiko was so good at, she successfully managed to lure Goro Akechi to Newcomer Bar, where now he sat across from her in a booth with a glass of oolong tea in front of him, a clearly uncomfortable smile plastered on his face.

He was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up, and looked like he hadn't had a good night's sleep in a long time. His appearance was a far cry from his previous perfection, and spoke volumes about his current lifestyle. Clearly, something had happened. And Ichiko had an inkling as to what.

_How the mighty have fallen._

“Just what kind of article are you planning to write?” He asked her, hands on his lap, not touching his tea.

“That's up to you,” Ohya answered smoothly, rum and coke in hand. “Readers will eat up any new info about you, right now. It doesn't even matter what I write. So you pick.”

Akechi frowned a little. “You can't just say nothing?”

“I could say nothing. But entertainment news is predicated on bullshit. Someone's gonna make something up, eventually. Whoever publishes something first leaves the strongest impression—so you want to be the one to speak, before someone else does it for you.” Ichiko had made basically the same speech to any number of celebrities to get them to cough up their scandals. This was old hat for her.

“…Akira did say something about that,” Akechi muttered.

“I told him the same thing I told you.” Ichiko downed her drink in one go and patted her notebook on the table. She generally preferred audio recording, but Akechi had said no. “He seemed concerned for your reputation.”

He snorted. “I have no more reputation.”

Ichiko shook her head. “I'm not sure why you think that. To the vast majority of the public, you just suddenly disappeared. This is less a scandal and more of a mystery. And you are—or were—a detective. So come on. Solve this mystery for us.”

Akechi seemed to consider. “I've withdrawn from my detective work due to…personal issues.”

“That's way too vague, honey.” Ichiko leaned over and called for another drink from Lala, then turned back to Akechi. “C'mon. You don't have to delve _too_ deep. Just give people a few sympathetic details. If you want to make it a sob story, you can make it a sob story. People eat that shit up.”

Anger flashed in Akechi's eyes. Clearly, he wasn't fond of pity. “As a detective, I was only really interested in a certain type of cases. And due to recent events, they've been resolved. So my efforts are no longer necessary.”

This was what Ichiko had invited him for. Lala brought her next drink, but Ichiko didn't touch it. She didn't want to get too drunk for this. Not yet, anyway. “You mean the mental shutdowns?”

Akechi's face remained carefully neutral, a clear sign that he had something to hide. This guy was a practiced liar for sure, but Ichiko had cracked open dozens of practiced liars in her career. “Yes.”

Ichiko decided to start laying some face cards on the table. “Does it have anything to do with Masayoshi Shido?”

Akechi's reaction to that name was to freeze up completely, stiff and straight in his seat, some half-attempt at a smile jammed into his mouth.

Ichiko already knew a hell of a lot about Masayoshi Shido, but she wasn't going to play her whole hand yet. “Some people are whispering that he had connections to many of the mental shutdowns—that he profited in various ways from them, however indirectly.” Ichiko picked up her drink and just rattled the ice around in it, enjoying the familiar sound of the soft clink of ice against glass. “You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?” She paused for effect. “As the _detective_ who was _investigating_ the case.”

Akechi gave her a blank-eyed stare, firmly yanking the corners of his mouth up. The effect wasn't pleasant. “Everything relevant that I know, I've already spoken of to the police.”

“Come on,” said Ichiko, taking a sip of her drink. “You haven't spoken to the police for months. There _has_ to have been more developments on that front. Especially since that whole election scandal.” Her eyes never left Akechi's face. “Akira's told me some things. About…his activities. He and I have had a long-standing arrangement, you know. He gives me information. I help out with the media.”

Akechi's eyes widened, then narrowed. The smile had withered from his face, and his lips were now sitting in a tight line. “How much has he told you?”

Ichiko's lips split in a toothy grin. She was just drunk enough to start getting nasty. And her intuition was telling her just how she could get Goro Akechi riled up. “He's pretty tight-lipped about Phantom Thief stuff. But he talks a helluva lot more when you're sucking his cock.”

Akechi's expression was just oozing poorly-disguised rage, his lips white and pressed together, his eyes flared.

“Ohh, did I hit a sore spot?” A sore spot which Ichiko dug her nails into sadistically. “You wish you could be doing the sucking?” she murmured in a low tone designed to provoke.

“Do you normally trade sexual favours for information?” Akechi spat, clearly trying to deflect the conversation from himself.

Ichiko wasn't easily offended by jabs at her virtue, though. She hadn't had any for a long time. “Not normally. But with Akira, it's always been part-business, part-pleasure.” She placed her glass down and leaned in to whisper low. “You know, he really likes being held down and told what to do. It gets him _so_ hard.”

Akechi's face was so red in anger and shame, he looked like a cherry about to pop. The mental image made Ichiko laugh, and she leaned back in her seat again, chugging down the rest of her drink. “Lala!” She called for another. She didn't even have to say what she wanted. Lala knew.

Akechi managed to compose himself somewhat again and choke out, “So what is this _actually_ about? You didn't invite me here just to rub your sex life in my face, did you? And it's not really about writing an entertainment article, is it?”

“Ohh, nice deduction, mister detective,” said Ichiko. “Thanks, Lala.” Lala set down a new drink at the table, and gave Ichiko a _hon, you need to stop drinking_ look while she was at it, which Ichiko ignored.

Ichiko reached back into her waist bag and pulled out a photo, then slid it across the table before Akechi. “Does this woman look familiar to you?”

Akechi glanced at the photo, then immediately looked away. “No.”

Ichiko leaned forward over the table, her eyes locked on Akechi's. “Are you _sure?_ Maybe you need to take a closer look at her face. Really _examine_ your memories to see if it rings any bells.”

Akechi's eyes slid down again and lingered a little longer on the photo. Ichiko didn't let her attention slack for even a fraction of a second, watching him like a hawk, ready to swoop down the moment she saw her prey was vulnerable.

Akechi's eyelids lowered a bit, and he turned his head away. “I don't know of her, I'm sorry.”

“Her _name_ ,” Ichiko spat, “was Kayo Murakami. Still doesn't ring any bells?”

His lip twitched. “No.”

“For a detective who was _supposedly_ investigating the mental shutdowns, you sure are _ignorant_ about the facts of the case.” Ichiko slowly pulled back to sit in a normal posture again. “I guess I overestimated your abilities.”

Akechi was really easy to bait. His reaction was immediate anger, and it showed through his attempt at a calm reply. “That woman was never listed as a victim of the mental shutdowns. If someone is never reported as a victim, how could you have expected me to respond to it?”

“Fair enough. Only her murderer would know what really happened to her.” Ichiko left the photo there on the table to stare at Akechi. He deserved to see it. “She was my partner, you know. A real upstanding journalist who was all about exposing the shit in society. She wasn't like me—she was about ideals. She was pure. She was the _real thing._ And you know where she is now?” Akechi didn't respond, just staring at the wall, but Ichiko didn't expect him to say anything, anyway. “She spends every day in a mental hospital staring at the wall, drooling on herself. There's nothing fucking left in her head. She's a _shadow_ of the woman she used to be.”

The word _shadow_ made Akechi twitch. He bit his lip.

“You wouldn't happen to have any leads on who did it, would you, now, _detective?_ Or rather, _former_ detective, I should say.” Ichiko wasn't even bothering to hide the seething animosity in her tone anymore.

Akechi was silent for a moment, his eyes never leaving the wall, before he said, “It's impossible to cause a mental shutdown in someone who truly is _pure._ They would have had to view the world through a distorted lens for their mind to be accessible.” His head turned to face her, and the look in his eyes was enough to make even a hard-boiled reporter like Ichiko Ohya shiver. “Kayo Murakami was just as dirty as the rest of us, if not more.”

Ichiko was about ready to grab him by the collar and yank him over the table, but she restrained herself for Lala's sake. She wouldn't want a scene. Instead, she knocked back her drink—or she would have, but found it already empty. She cursed. She didn't even remember drinking it. How many had she had?

She took a deep breath. “That's basically a confession of guilt.”

“You can't prove anything.”

Now _that_ was a line only the guilty ever said. “I know. I know there's some weird magic shit going on with the Phantom Thieves. And no serious outlet will ever buy any of it. But…” she lowered her voice. “I don't need to prove anything to publish a good story.”

Akechi jerked in his seat. “What are you trying to say?”

“I'm saying I could just _make. Shit. Up._ Mix some truth and lies, you know? How about this one? I could write a piece about how the former famous Detective Prince, Goro Akechi, was in fact Masayoshi Shido's secret piece of ass, and then—when Goro Akechi found out Shido was in fact actually his father, what do you think he did? Oh, he just kept going! That daddy's dick was just _too good_ to pass up on—”

Ichiko was interrupted by the splash of cold oolong tea in her face, followed up by the plastic cup hitting her face, further followed up by her own glass hitting her on the face and then dropping to smash on the floor. _Ow. I'm gonna have a bruise on my forehead, for sure_. Akechi was standing in his seat, looking like he would have knocked over the table, too, if it hadn't been bolted down to the floor.

Instantly, Lala was there, slamming down two drinks neither of them had ordered on the table: a hot chocolate in front of Akechi, and a big glass of tomato juice in front of Ichiko.

Ichiko looked over at Lala, confused. “I hate tomato juice. I ordered a rum and coke.” At least, she assumed she had. She didn't quite remember.

“I know you do, hon. And you're gonna drink that whole thing. You're drunk, and you're a mean drunk. You stop raking that poor boy over the coals. He looks like he's about to have a panic attack. Wipe yourself off.” She tossed a bar rag at Ichiko's face, then presumably went to get a broom to sweep up the broken glass.

Ichiko wiped the tea off her face with the bar rag, then sniffed it. “This bar rag is dirty!”

“Just for you, hon!”

 _That sassy bitch._ Ichiko could never be mad for real at Lala, though. She patted the water off her shirt, then put the rag down on the table and looked at Akechi.

He'd slumped down in his seat again, the mug of hot chocolate pulled closer to him. It looked like cheap instant stuff with little mini marshmallows in it. He was staring into it intently, as if he could read the future out of it or something.

For the first time that evening, he just really looked like a kid. How old was he? Eighteen? Had he even graduated from high school? How old had he been when he'd murdered Kayo? _(Ichiko was more certain now than ever that he had been the one to do it.)_ Seventeen? Sixteen?

When Ichiko had been sixteen, the biggest problem in her life had been the latest in a string of unrequited crushes.

Right now, Goro Akechi looked a hell of a lot less like a stone-cold murderer with a flawless social mask and more like a kicked puppy, and Ichiko had just been giving him extra kicks. She'd done enough research on him to know that life had given him the shit end of the stick. Nobody deserved to be related to Masayoshi Shido.

Making digs at his jealousy and obvious daddy issues wasn't at all productive, no matter how emotionally satisfying it was in the moment.

Ichiko sighed and fished around in her bag for her cigarettes, stuck one in her mouth and lit it. She wasn't really in the mood for asking permission. They were in a bar, he'd just have to suck it up. She took a long drag, exhaled, and tapped her cigarette on the ashtray on the table. “I'm sorry. I went way too far. It's just…personal for me.”

Akechi didn't reply, just looking down at his hot chocolate. Not drinking it.

“Kayo and I…were close. The day she disappeared, I was supposed to have been there with her, as backup. But I…wasn't.” _Because I was too busy being dead-ass drunk,_ she did not add. She was telling Akechi this sort of as an apology for being a shit. Trading some private information of her own in exchange for all she'd dug up on him. Perhaps it wasn't much of an apology, but still. An attempt. Or maybe she was just drunk and feeling gushy.

“…I don't actually want to expose you, or anything,” Ichiko admitted. “Not like I can. And I'm not scummy enough to actually write any of that shit. I'm just mad.” She took another long drag, not really looking at Akechi. “Partly at you. Partly at myself.” She blew out a breath of smoke away from Akechi, then looked at her glass of tomato juice. She should probably be drinking that. She picked it up, took a sip, and winced. Lala was merciless.

“Shido put you up to it, didn't he?” Ichiko said, with a glance at Akechi.

Akechi didn't say anything, but his silence was basically an affirmative.

“I figured.” Ichiko drank another chug of tomato juice. “Ugh, this is fucking disgusting!” she said, loud enough for Lala to hear, knowing Lala would enjoy hearing her complaints.

“It's good for you!” Lala called from across the bar. Ichiko rolled her eyes.

“And you can't do it anymore? Akira told me a bit about that—about how none of that stuff should be happening anymore.”

A tiny nod.

Ichiko watched her cigarette burn down a little on its own. “Then that's enough, really. That's all it's ever been about. I just…kind of wanted closure. It just got kinda vengeful. Sorry.”

Akechi gave a wheeze of a laugh. “I really can't throw stones at anyone feeling vengeful.”

Ichiko tapped off the ash, then brought her cigarette to her lips again and leaned back. “Someone you wanted revenge against?”

“…Yes,” Akechi admitted. For the first time, he reached out to his hot chocolate, picking it up to take a sip.

“Lemme guess. Shido?”

“…”

“Trust me, there are about a million people who resent that fucker. Including yours truly,” Ichiko jabbed a thumb at herself. “Get in line.”

Akechi laughed. It wasn't a nice-sounding laugh. But at least he wasn't just staring at his hot chocolate anymore.

“And, uh…” She took another swig of tomato juice. That shit really did sober her up. “Just so you know, it's not like…super serious with me and Akira? I mean, he's just a kid, really. A really smooth-talking goddamn hero of a kid, but a kid.” And she was just a thirty-mumble worka-alcoholic with no social circle beyond ~~her enabler~~ Lala, who drank alone rather than drink with her coworkers. Ichiko had initially just flirted with Akira as a joke because she was lonely and horny. That was not the basis for a decent relationship, even if she was somewhat infatuated with him (who wouldn't be?).

Besides, this kid clearly needed him more. Ichiko could handle herself.

Even if it would be a little lonely.

“And you know,” she added with a little smile, “he worked part time here for a while. How many totally straight boys do you know who would do that? He talks about you all the time.” This was true. Lately it had just been Akechi this, Akechi that. Ichiko had to admit to herself that she was jealous.

Akechi held his mug of hot chocolate in both hands in front of his face, probably an attempt to hide his blush. He was actually kind of cute, for a serial killer. It was hard to stay mad at such a pretty face. “I-I'm not…” he stuttered.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, you're a closet case, I get it.” Ichiko chugged the rest of her tomato juice, then drowned out the taste with a cigarette. “You're still young. You haven't fucked up your life yet, not really. So don't go thinking it's all over.” She paused, and looked down at her notebook. “I can actually write that fluff piece, if you want. I could make it so you can appear in the public eye again. You don't want to be wearing hoodies for the rest of your life, do you?”

Akechi looked a little surprised, putting down his hot chocolate. “Do you think it would help?”

“Of course it'd help!” Ichiko crowed. “Don't you underestimate Ichiko Ohya's influence over public opinion! You want to make some excuse about having cancer? I can do that. Or maybe your real dream is to be a pop star? I can write a piece on that. You've got the name recognition, and I've got the media connections. If you want the magazines next week to talk about how you're secretly actually a panda bear, Ichiko Ohya can _fucking do it_.”

Akechi laughed for real, and hot damn if he wasn't pretty when he did that, even dressed in an old hoodie with circles under his eyes. She could see how he'd gotten that fan base. “I'll have to think about it. I admit…I haven't given much thought as to my future course.” He looked down at his swiftly emptying hot chocolate ruefully.

“Hey, if you're hurting for some cash, you can always get a job here,” said Ichiko, only half-joking. “The regulars would love you, you could take a fake name and hide behind a wig and some makeup, and you'd look way better in a dress than Lala.”

Akechi's reaction to that was to choke into his mug, while Lala called out, “I heard that! ...But she's right, you'd be gorgeous. Invitation's open, honey.”

Akechi seemed too mortified to even formulate a reply, so Ichiko decided to stop teasing him for now. “Anyway, think about it. I gave you my card.” Ichiko pointed to where her business card still lay on the table in front of him.

“…Thank you.”

Ichiko hadn't been expecting a thanks from him (did she honestly deserve it after she dragged him here to get drunk and threaten him with blackmail?) but what she really wanted out of him was an apology (and she hadn't gotten that, and she didn't think she'd ever get that, but maybe their conversation had been close enough).

But when Akechi eventually left, he quietly took the photo of Kayo along with Ichiko's business card and slipped it into the pocket of his hoodie, and Ichiko let him take it.

Maybe it had been stupid to try to seek closure like this. It wasn't as if it would change anything for Kayo. She'd cleared Kayo's name already. That was done. And nothing was going to bring Kayo's mind back.

After Akechi left, Ichiko slumped over the table for a while, sinking into a morass of swiftly sobering drunkenness and negative thought spirals. The tomato juice meant Lala was cutting her off for real, so she didn't order anymore.

What was she doing, promising to write fluff pieces for Kayo's murderer? And then trying to push her boyfriend off on him? Maybe it was just too apparent what a trainwreck human being Goro Akechi was, and he was hard to hate, as one trainwreck human being to another. Maybe she just had to feel a little empathy for a kid crushing on the straights (was Akira really straight, though?). Or maybe it was just a half-hearted attempt to push Akira away. _(It was an objective fact that he was too good for her.)_ She certainly had a long history of doing that with people.

She thought about texting Akira to dump him for real, but cringed at the thought of dumping him via text, and then also didn't really want to dump him at all. Maybe Akechi wouldn't repeat all that stuff she'd said to him to Akira. He was probably too shy to bring that up, anyway. This didn't mean the end of things between her and Akira, not necessarily. They could still be together. Not like it was going anywhere.

Akira really did talk a lot about Akechi.

Then her mind circled back around to Kayo again, how clearing her name had been—it had been a relief, certainly, and her job was no longer torture (which was great) but Ichiko's personal life was still a wasteland. That wasteland was now just also occupied by cute jailbait, another tick to add to her list of bad life decisions (it wasn't even the worst of them, sadly enough).

Kayo's absence still hurt. That continued to ache dully, only slightly less painful now than it had been two years ago _(if anything it was worse, rawer now that she'd seen the empty shell of Kayo in the mental hospital. Was she even really dead? Was it okay to be mourning? She should have asked him if mental shutdown really meant death. Maybe he knew what it actually was. If there was any hope. But on the other hand, she didn't really want to know)._

She'd got what she wanted. She had the truth. So why was she still such a fuck-up?

“You need to go home, Ichiko,” Lala eventually said. At some point, she'd come around to sweep up the glass on the floor, and Ichiko hadn't even noticed.

“I'll give you some extra for the glass,” Ichiko muttered, not lifting her head. She didn't want to show her face yet.

“I've seen you cry before, girl. You can get up.”

“Agh…” Ichiko pushed herself off the table and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Sorry I'm such a mess today.”

“You're a mess every day. We all are. I'm used to it.”

Ichiko couldn't help but grin. “Well, sorry I'm such a mess every day, then. I can't believe I got to the tomato juice stage so fast.”

“I'm gonna start tomato juicing you after four drinks if you don't slow down. You're not gonna have a liver left by forty.”

“You're gonna kill your business if you keep refusing customers booze.”

“Customers are my business, not booze.” Lala grabbed the cups on the table and whisked them away, and Ichiko got out her wallet to pay the bill, leaving the cash on the table.

“One of these days I'll get sober, and then you'll be sorry!” Ichiko called out as she strolled for the door.

“Honey, I make a mean virgin margarita.” Lala's expression broke from her standard ironic detachment into a rare smile. “And maybe I'll put up a food menu, instead.”

Ichiko paused on her way out the door, looking back at Lala. “I don't deserve you, Lala,” she said with a silly grin.

“Yes, you do,” Lala replied, turning around to spin behind the bar and duck into the back.

Ichiko shook her head and left.

 


End file.
